C. Milton Wright High School honored for commitment and excellence in teaching about the Holocaust

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        C. Milton Wright High School (CMW) was added to the Ponczak-Greenblatt Families’ Honor Roll of Schools on April 15, 2018, for commitment and excellence in teaching about the Holocaust.
        Mr. Brian Ponczak, the son of Samuel Ponczak, a Holocaust survivor, presented Frau Carol Wyman and Madame Lucy Wise-Gladwell with certificates from the Baltimore Jewish Council, as well as a beautiful plaque for the school at the Yom H’Shoah reception for Holocaust survivors. The ceremony was held at Chizuk Amuno synagogue.
        The award memorializes Holocaust survivors Morris J. and Anna Greenblatt and their daughter Frieda Greenblatt Ponczak and is one of several programs of the commission, which is dedicated to commemoration and education of the Holocaust across the community.
        Ms. Wyman teaches German at CMW and met Mr. Leo Bretholz, a Holocaust survivor, at her church’s Passover/Holy Thursday dinner in 2010. He directed her to Jeannette Parmigiani, who runs the Holocaust survivor speaker program at the Baltimore Jewish Council, and told her about the Summer Teacher’s Institute for educators. Ms. Parmigiani nominated CMW for the award as well.
        Ms. Wyman turned to Ms. Wise-Gladwell, the French teacher at C. Milton Wright High School, to plan the Holocaust Remembrance Day assembly at CMW. Beginning in 2010, they invited Leo Bretholz to give his powerful testimony of leaving Vienna, being incarcerated at Drancy, France, then jumping off a train on the way to Auschwitz and running from the Nazis until the war was over.
        Every year since then, CMW has hosted a Holocaust speaker. The auditorium is filled with 700 students who hear firsthand witness to history. They realize that they are the last generation to have this opportunity. Guest speakers have included Bluma Shapiro and Rubin Stzjaer, both Auschwitz survivors; Halina Silber, a Schindler’s List survivor; Sol Goldstein, a liberator of Buchenwald; and Edith Cord and Dr. Avigor Niv, both hidden children. Each story is unique and very moving.
        In addition, Ms. Wyman and Ms. Wise-Gladwell teach about the Holocaust extensively in their German and French classes, using appropriate German and French films about survivors and upstanders. The classes also read about the Holocaust in their respective languages.
        Each summer, Ms. Wyman and Ms. Wise-Gladwell attend Teaching the Holocaust seminars through the Baltimore Jewish Council. There are amazing presentations by authors, professors, artists who specialize in Holocaust Studies.
        Ms. Wyman attended the Jewish Foundation for the Righteous (JFR) week-long seminar at Columbia University in 2013. She also traveled summer 2017 with the JFR group of educators on a 10-day trip to Lithuania and Poland, visiting Auschwitz, Treblinka, Mauthausen, concentration camps, and Ponary and Kovno, where Jews were shot en masse. Dr. Samuel Kassow, Trinity College, and Dr. Peter Hayes, Northwestern University, two elite Holocaust scholars and authors, accompanied the group and lectured at the sites.
        The JFR supports “Righteous” – non Jews who risked their lives to help rescue Jews during the war. The group met three rescuers, as well as a survivor of Jedwabne (the town where 300 Jews were forced in to a barn and burned alive).
        Ms. Wyman said, “This was a life-altering experience. It was disturbing, yet very moving, to see the actual sites that we have studied. I came back in a state of shock over what we had seen and learned. But it was also deeply moving to be with people who had personal stories of the Holocaust.”
        Students have told Ms. Wyman and Ms. Wise-Gladwell that hearing the testimonies of the speakers has been the most profound experience that they have had in high school.
        “We want students to carry the Holocaust survivors stories and messages – that what you do does matter, and that even one person can make a difference. Speak up when you see intolerance!” said Ms. Wise-Gladwell. “Be an upstander!”
        Ms. Wyman and Ms. Wise-Gladwell impress upon the students that the testimony they hear is theirs to tell.

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